Wild plums, green and purple, hung heavy above the path as Jane and I began our circuit of Thorney Island, a narrow-necked peninsula suspended like a bulbous fruit from the inner shoreline of Chichester Harbour.
First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window
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A memorable feature of my wife’s childhood in this low-lying coastal country had been the vee-shaped bomber planes from Thorney Island’s RAF base – long since closed – that would rumble overhead, low and dark in the sky.
Black-headed gulls screamed peevishly from the mud banks exposed at low water; oystercatchers piped, and curlews made their melancholy bubbling cry. Salt, mud, seaweed – the smells were of tidal country under a drying wind. As for the views, they widened over mud flats green with algae and weed, seamed with wriggling creeks known locally as rithes, out west to the low wooded coastline of Hayling Island. Inland, hissing beds of reeds lined the waters of the broad ditch romantically named Great Deep.
Sea lavender lay in purple mats on the salt marshes. Leopard-spotted comma butterflies alighted on fleabane flowers and opened their scalloped wings to the sun. From the seawall path, the army establishment that replaced Thorney’s RAF base in 1984 was so well hidden among the trees it might not have been there. The only clue as to where those great triangular bombers had taken to the skies was a grey smear of runway tarmac, long disused.
We watched a lovely old wooden sailing boat scudding down Sweare Deep under a white bulge of jib, the mainsail rattling up as the boat heeled into Emsworth Channel. By the time we had reached Longmere Point at the nethermost tip of Thorney, the tide had crept in to cover mud flats, shell banks and rithes in a rippling world of water that spread south towards the open mouth of Chichester Harbour.
St Nicholas’s Church at West Thorney, ‘the least known and altogether uttermost church in Sussex’, has stood here on the remote eastern coast of the island for 800 years. Wartime Allied and German servicemen share the graveyard, foes in life, brothers in death.
Under the seawall an unseen fish hunted the flood-tide shallows, dorsal fin and tail cutting the surface. Far to the east the spire of Chichester Cathedral glowed ghostly white in the evening sun, the South Downs ran in black and gold along the northern skyline, and from the marina moorings came the music of halyards blown by the wind against yacht masts, chinking and chiming like miniature bells.
Start: Sussex Brewers PH, 36 Main Rd, Hermitage, West Sussex PO10 8AU (OS ref SU 755057)
Getting there: A27/A259 to Emsworth. Park in village; follow A259 to Sussex Brewery PH
Walk (9 miles, easy, OS Explorer 120. NB: Online maps, more walks at christophersomerville.co.uk): Follow footpath down side of pub (fingerpost), then field edges south to boatyard. Right (755053, fingerpost) through Emsworth Yacht Harbour to sea wall. Left (753052, fingerpost) anti-clockwise round Thorney Island for 7 miles, passing Little Deep (752047), Great Deep (749040), Marker Point (746023), Longmere Point (768011), West Thorney Church (770025), Stanbury Point (770031) and Prinsted Point (766042). At foot of road above Thornham Marina (766051), turn left inland along Sussex Border Path past Thornham Farm for half a mile to cross Thorney Road (756051). Over stile (fingerpost), across field and opposite stile. Right (fingerpost) past stilt houses, and retrace path to Sussex Brewery PH.
Lunch: Sussex Brewery PH, Hermitage (01243-371533; sussexbrewery.com) – a really friendly, clean and welcoming pub.
Chichester Harbour Conservancy (01243-512301; conservancy.co.uk) – walks, information and much more.
Information: Chichester TIC (01243-775888; visitsussex.org)
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